The Tesla Cybertruck is a new type of electric truck made by Tesla. It looks very different from regular trucks and can drive with power to either the back wheels or all four wheels.
Tariffs are extra taxes that countries put on things coming from other countries. When the U.S. charges tariffs on cars sent to Canada, it can make those cars more expensive or harder to get.
The Tesla Model Y is an electric car that looks like a small SUV and runs only on electricity instead of gas. It's popular because it can go far on a single charge and has lots of space inside. People talk about it a lot because it's changing how many people think about electric cars.
A kilowatt hour battery is like a big rechargeable battery in electric cars that tells you how much power it can hold, which affects how far the car can drive.
The Kia EV9 is a big electric SUV that’s good for families and has lots of space inside. It runs on batteries and is designed to compete with other new electric SUVs. People talk about it because it’s part of the new wave of electric cars coming soon.
The Rivian R1S is a fancy electric SUV that can drive on rough roads and also feels nice inside. It runs on batteries instead of gas and is made by a newer company trying to make cool electric cars. People talk about it because it’s different from other electric cars and can go places many can’t.
The Hyundai Ioniq 6 is an electric car that looks like a regular sedan but runs on batteries. It’s designed to be very efficient and stylish. However, it’s no longer being sold in the U.S., so it might be harder to find there.
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is an electric car that looks modern and has lots of room inside. It charges quickly and is good for people who want a practical electric car. It’s talked about because it’s one of the popular electric cars you can buy today.
Aptera is a new kind of electric car that has three wheels and can charge itself a little bit using sunlight. It’s made to use less energy and go very far on a single charge. People talk about it because it’s very different from regular cars and could save a lot of energy.
Before a car is made for everyone, companies build a few test versions to make sure everything works well. This test building happens on the validation assembly line.
The Yangwang U9 is a very fast and fancy electric car made in China. It’s special because it uses the latest technology and looks very cool. People talk about it because it shows how Chinese car companies are making exciting new electric cars.
A subway is a train that runs underground in cities to help people get around.
LIVE
One, we are live on the episode of The Electric Podcast, I am Fred Lindberg, your host.
And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintron.
How are you doing this week, Seth?
I'm good.
All right.
Let's jump in.
We have plenty to talk about this week.
We were going to talk a little bit about this little Cybertruck update last week.
We talked about, we didn't know exactly what was going to happen with it and how we know.
The BYD basically shamed the entire auto industry this week with a bunch of unveiling regarding
its latest battery technology and its charging technology making basically everyone look bad.
We have another Donald Lap update, and that's becoming like a little weakly thing for us
to talk about.
Is it real or not?
And yeah, we'll up there update also that we're going to discuss.
Well, let's jump right in starting with the Cybertruck.
So probably the weirdest trim launch ever, if you don't remember, Tesla announced
a new all-wheel drive Cybertruck at $60,000, and it's the new cheapest Cybertruck ever,
production one at least.
And unlike the rear-wheel drive launch at $70,000 last year for a very short lifter
at a time with completely decontended with a bunch of feature missing, this one
was actually pretty good value if you are willing to say that about the Cybertruck.
But it came with a weird deadline of like only for 10 days, and that's what Elon said.
Then he later clarified that the price is only for 10 days.
And then even weirder than at all, he says that Tesla's going to use this 10-day period
to gauge the demand for the vehicle and then it will increase the price accordingly,
which makes no sense because the data is completely invalidated by the fact that
you just created an urgency to buy the vehicle.
So you won't really have a real idea of the demand at any price, even at the $60,000 price.
You don't even have a real good demand idea for the vehicle.
But what happened is basically exactly what we expected.
10 days happened, March 1st, Tesla increased the price to $70,000 or $10,000 in price of the price.
If you compare it at the very least to the $70,000 rear-wheel drive version of the truck that they released last year,
it is a big upgrade.
You basically just lose a little bit of range.
You still get 325 miles of range on a single charge, but I think it was closer to 340 for the rear-wheel drive.
You don't lose the rear-wheel drive because it's still a dual-motor all-wheel drive system.
And you have the tonneau cover, you have the power plugs, the outlet in the back.
You have the air suspension too, I think.
No, that was the one thing they moved, I thought.
Or wait, maybe not.
You have the power share access too, so it's bi-directional charging,
even though I'm pretty sure you had that on the rear-wheel drive too, it makes no sense.
I thought the suspension was the one thing that they did pull out.
I mean, they have to pull out a few things to get down to $10,000, but no, I'm blanking on it.
Yeah, that's a damping.
So yeah, you probably lose the, because the Cybertrux, the standard Cybertrux,
the $80,000 Cybertrux now has active air suspension
and active sieve damping.
Now, if they just mention that sieve damping.
Yeah, I think that's pretty much it.
So it's going to be interesting to say, I don't think that saves the Cybertrux.
I think definitely they probably got a big boost of order from the $60,000 version
because $60,000, again, actually made a lot of sense.
It was like a $20,000 drop versus the previous version, so it's huge.
So I think they got a big back level of order for that.
And then at $70,000, I think they're still going to get some orders from them.
But once we're through the backlog that they created, I think the vehicle program
goes from like five to, I mean, best case scenario, 10,000 units a quarter,
which is still like way below capacity.
So I don't know what they're going to do with that exactly.
But they probably saved themselves for like the about another year
out of the Cybertruck program, I think, with that.
We'll give them that.
It was a smart move.
Even the smart move for smart, but desperate move, let's call it
because it's just it's just not a great look that we did that.
Oh, yeah.
And before we go to the Canadian model three inventory, I want to discuss
this one because they also screwed a lot of people over with that one
where they did say, and I mean, I see these crew people over.
I think they're going to always give up on this thing.
It's another one of Elon's poor, like urgency, like artificial urgency
creation to create demand.
It's the FSD transfer was officially extended for one more, one last quarter
until March 31st, but then amid the Cybertruck situation,
the $60,000 Cybertruck, you know, the production slot work
were quickly filled out for the whole quarter.
So Tesla did say that it would be order if you order by March 31st,
you will get your Cybertruck, your FSD transfer, including on the Cybertruck.
But then the switch it out from order by March 31st to delivery
by March 31st, which screwed up basically the vast majority of people
who did order the $60,000 Cybertruck.
And if you do the math, if you had FSD on it and now you need to buy it,
if you are, you are basically better off just buying a $70,000 one.
If you could get delivery right now, then the $10,000 of, well,
I mean, now it's a subscription only so you can get the value difference.
Basically, it's the same thing.
So yeah, it's a classic old Tesla.
You got Musk.
That's a new thing now people are seeing.
Yeah.
Musked.
So it's a quick imagine you buy like the Cybertruck to save Tesla,
like save the vehicle program for Tesla.
And then the first thing they do is screw you over.
It's just not a great look.
It's kind of like the Model 3 performance as soon as everybody on the waitlist got
got their cars, they dropped it like like $10,000 or something.
Yeah.
$5,000 within two weeks after people after filling up the demand of the people
that have been waiting for like four years to get the vehicle.
But they did reverse that after I made my complaint.
Yes.
And they did reverse it.
You were the hero and the anti-hero based on whether or not you had
just purchased a Model 3.
Well, even if you didn't like, I think it was the right thing to do.
But then I got some crazy emails from that.
Like, I got like, that's what the beginning of when I started to see
just how like wrong the Tesla community were going, like it was becoming
super toxic and especially around the cult of personality of Elon.
Cause I remember receiving like emails from people of like, how dare you
like tell Elon what to do, like enforce him to do this?
Which all I didn't force anything.
I was just like, I just pointed out that it was wrong.
I cannot force him to do it.
But like you can't is that was my first investigation.
Like, oh, I challenging the Elon is no, no for a lot of these people.
And yeah, that was the beginning of the of the end for for the feedback loop
at Tesla on the Canadian front, while Canadian in the U.S.
is involved here, too, was interesting situation this week.
So we saw that the Canadian Model 3 inventory just disappeared in Canada.
And there were a lot of Model 3s left in Canada just for the because of
all of them came from the U.S. tariffs.
I got like one of the last one that was not.
Well, at least you never actually know if like they say like it's
the idea if it never was any tariffs applied to it or just Tesla
is just eating it, but I was one of the last one that was
listed inventory pre tariffs that I got in December.
And there were still a lot of them sitting around in Canadian lots
because it was just Model 3 was super expensive.
That's the Chinese one or no, it was a U.S.
Yeah, so it was before the so that the Chinese tariffs have been on since
twenty twenty four in Canada.
So those have been, you know, this hasn't been a new one since.
But the there was a period between twenty four and twenty five
where the model three was coming for the U.S.
Another crazy bad price still not as good as the Chinese Model 3, for sure.
But then the twenty five percent tariffs on U.S.
EVs that Canada implemented due to the the tariff war that the U.S.
initiated that that killed the model three price in Canada.
It was cheaper to get the Model Y from Berlin than the Model 3.
And so now there was no solution really for that.
They were sitting there for a while, but not as a different solution
with the Canadian opening up to Chinese EVs again.
That includes Tesla's Chinese EVs.
So what we think is happening is Tesla sent.
Well, we know they sent them back in the U.S.
We have sources that confirm it to us, but they sent them back to the U.S.
and expectation that they're going to be able to fill their inventory
back up with cheaper Model 3s from China soon enough.
We might have even seen like they might be on the way really because.
We saw like in January, for example,
Tesla extremely poor sales in China.
But they had the record export.
So maybe some of the export are going to to Canada again.
So something keep an eye on.
All right, that was it for Tesla this week.
Well, not too much to lose.
We're going to jump right away.
We have a lot of B.Y.D. news this week.
So that the two big with B.Y. News.
The first one is the Blade Battery 2.0.
So the Blade Battery has taken over the industry in the last
I want to say three years or so.
Even Tesla uses them now.
It's like top of the line LFP cells that basically all the benefits of the LFP
cells and like all the lower end benefits of NMC cells.
So still strong energy density, but also longevity,
safety and longevity.
And now they have a next level one, the Blade Battery 2.0,
which B.Y.D. claims that it enables a thousand kilometers, 600 miles EVs.
That's on the CLTC standard.
But still we're talking about like 500 mile vehicles and 500 miles vehicles
to at a decent price.
That's I think that's the main thing here to keep in mind.
They talk and also the new it enables a new level of charging.
They call it flash charging, which can charge from 10 to 70 percent
in five minutes and from 10 to 97 percent set in just nine minutes.
They also talk a little bit about the temperature performance.
So it works great at minus 30 C minus 20 Fahrenheit for a full 24 hours.
Still charge.
So you leave that you leave it in that cold for 24 hours
and it will still charge 20 to 97 percent in 10 minutes.
12 minutes, sorry, which is pretty good.
Yeah, I think also you like you can charge it tonight.
So they said they keep they say 97 percent instead of the 100 percent.
And because not because you need to keep it the buffer like that,
like most EVs for longevity and FB cells, you need a lot less of that.
So they say that more for the for realtor braking, because, you know,
if you if you're a hundred percent, your region doesn't work.
And for some people, if you get used to it,
it can be a bit disconcerting when you get out and now you don't have it.
So the U7, so the Wang, the Yang Wang, which is their luxury brand,
they're going to launch a new U7 vehicle.
They already had the U8 and U9.
And the U7 is going to be the first to use this,
but it's going to go through the entire lineup,
because I think they already unveiled one.
What else on the battery cells?
So do we know what kind of form factor the U7 is?
Because, you know, the U8 is a SUV.
The U9 is like a sports car.
I think it's going to be a sedan.
Yeah. Well, I think this is it, right?
You know, this is this is the new U7.
Yeah. So it's kind of going to be like a Model S competitor.
Well, former Model S.
The thing is, you're going to be able to fit a hundred and fifty
kilowatt battery pack in there like this is.
I can I can I see a little bit of the Taycan on the
side profile here.
But super aggressive headlights, a little bit too big for me.
They also have the Denza.
So the Denza Z9 is also going to use this.
And it's one of the is the first vehicle that's that's going
to get to the 1000 kilometer range, the 744 miles
against on CLTC, but still should be close to 500 miles without it.
Well, I should say 559 miles on WLTP on the U.S.
It would be 450 miles, pretty, pretty giant difference here.
Yeah, we were talking in the room about how Mercedes had the
EQXX concept car that was going to go over 100 miles.
But that's a concept, obviously.
Yeah. But what's kind of cool about that thing is it's
so aerodynamic that you could get to 1000 miles on a 100
kilowatt hour battery.
It's kind of nuts.
Yeah, it shows the difference between if you go for efficiency,
if you go for just more batteries.
And for BYD, BYD makes its own batteries.
And you know, they just throw more kilowatt hours at it.
Yeah, they control the cost pretty well.
So they're like, yeah, I mean, we don't mind putting more
batteries in it.
I mean, and they can still do improvement on the
aerodynamic front, like after on different models.
All right, so then the flash charger, a little bit more
information on this from Jamie did a follow-up post.
So it's 1,500 kilowatts, so 1.5 megawatts at the
consumer-level vehicles.
And they have actual examples of this.
We posted one this morning.
This is happening right now.
It's, you know, they already had 1000 kilowatt chargers
there.
We don't even have that in North America, other than like a
few megachargers for like commercial vehicles.
But it keeps emphasizing just how far behind the rest of the
world is it's falling behind China because like it's the
chicken and eggs situation is like why one of the reason
we don't have megawatt chargers in North America is
because we don't have the vehicles to take that kind
of power anyway.
But then if you don't have this kind of vehicles, you
won't have the charging.
If you don't have the charging, you don't have these
kind of vehicles.
So like you're stuck in this, and meanwhile, they already,
a year later, they are at 1,500 kilowatts.
It's hard to keep up.
So one thing to be fair, though, so like the BYD and the
announcement talk about installing like 20,000 of
them by the end of the year, they were saying this
like similar things about the megawatt charging
two last year and it didn't get quite close to the
what they were saying.
So it's, I'm sure they're going to deploy them like fairly
pretty fast, but take these actual deployment rate
with a grain of salt here.
What else?
Yeah, there was a demonstration.
Yeah, I mean, this is, this is not a children's story
if you get the reference.
Yeah.
Then last thing on BYD, they also unveil the first images
and some specs on their coming three row SUV.
So they, they have a lot of things, you know, they have
a pretty deep lineup, but they were missing a little
bit on that front.
So and everybody else kind of unveiled that in China
this year, you know, we've been tested out with
them a little YL, but also XPANG as one, NIO as one,
LeapModer as one, Zikr as a very popular one too,
with Geely.
So they kind of needed to follow on that.
And this is the Great Tang, I'm not sure I like that.
The BYD Great Tang is the name, 950 kilometers
arranged for the single mortar unit.
I think 850 if I remember.
Where did I see that?
Yeah, 850 kilometers, 528 miles.
If you want the dual motor, all wheel drive version.
And this is a very nice vehicle.
Take a look at this.
The inside captain seats for the second row, zero gravity.
Here's the front.
You have like an instrument cluster and the passengers
greet on top of a giant center display.
This is the third row, which looks spacious right now,
but that's without the front seat.
It looks like if there wasn't recline like that,
there would still be plenty of space.
Yeah, great looking vehicle and I was showing
that did you see the price set?
I didn't, what is it?
Yeah, I want you to guess, give it a guess.
It's still in the IRN version of BYD.
Keep that in mind.
60,000.
You're pretty close.
400,000 in Wien, so that's about $58,000.
2000, come on.
Yeah, the price is right.
You would get some money out of that.
The two tone, I don't know if I like the two tone on this.
But in all black, it looks pretty cool.
Yeah, but this is a very crowded space in China right now,
but it's also something like if you want to see like North America,
this would be obviously would make a killing.
Like it would be a great competitor to like the EV9
and the Rivian or even the, would be a little bit,
not as luxurious maybe as the Rivian R1S, but pretty close.
Finest get off road.
Not really an aim for that, but still pretty good.
All right, we have three more news items to discuss,
and then we're going to jump into the comment section.
I see already plenty of people are asking questions.
We appreciate that, but we're going to have some time
to put a little bit more of them in there
in about five minutes or so we can jump in.
Yeah, bad news from Hyundai.
They've been talking about it for a while,
but with the pullback on the EVs in the American market,
they've been one of the last ones that we were like,
all right, they could still make some foray
with their EVs as they are all in and them,
but now they have officially cut the Ioniq 6
from the lineup in the U.S.
So do we have any delivery numbers on that?
It wasn't the most popular, obviously.
The Ioniq 5 was still the go-to.
No, there's no number on it.
And then there's obviously Kia,
that's also as it's on competitor,
but it's on entry in the same segment
that's now they are considering pulling.
It's not clear if it's going to happen or not.
But yeah, another blowback from the big changes,
regulatory changes in the last year in the U.S.
No, a lot of positive.
I mean, unless you just believe all the propaganda,
but I mean, today we're expecting
55,000 new job creation in February,
and it was minus 92,000.
And manufacturing job,
I've been just dropping like crazy.
And I think the EV sector is actually a big part of it.
Like a lot of manufacturing job have been lost
in the automotive and specifically the EV sector.
Aptera, a little update on Aptera this week.
They announced that they completed their first validation assembly,
their first Aptera solar car from the validation assembly line.
So it's not the assembly line, it's the validation assembly line.
So it's all the same processes,
but just not put together in volume production.
And honestly, I'm not super excited by this news
because it's like they already said that they had validation units out there.
And now they say again,
like if this is going to be used to get like the AP certification and whatnot,
which I thought my other thing is that the other validation units
that were already on the road for the last few months,
we're going to be used for that too.
So is it actually like great progress?
I don't know, but I wish them the best.
Because like we said many times,
we really want to see this kind of vehicle hit the market,
super efficient vehicle.
It's just that with their current financial situation,
bringing that to market is extremely difficult.
And also the price range,
even though they claim having $50,000 in reservation,
that includes, I think you have one set, I have one,
but depending if it comes out at the original like $25,000 price
or the $35,000 price,
there's a lot of,
there's starting to be other EVs out there
that are a lot more practical that are in the same price range.
So it's going to be a tough market for it there.
All right.
The last thing I want to discuss before jumping into the comment section
is Donut Lab.
So last week we discussed the first test,
the charging test that they released.
It was the first independent test of a Donut Lab set
with the miracle battery that they claim to be the first production
solid state battery.
Or it is the first solid state battery to go into a production EV,
the Verge motorcycle electric.
And now they've released the kind of doing small drops
of the independent test results.
Again, last week was the fast charging,
which was very impressive.
This time is the extreme temperature.
We kind of had some idea of that from last week's test
where they were testing a certain temperature
and also testing at what degrees the cells would go at those temperature.
And now it's just regular discharging at the one C rate
but at the different temperature.
So we can see at 80 plus Celsius.
So significant like you would be at like the dead valley at this
80 plus Celsius, I think.
It just charged at 24 amps, delivered 27.5 amp hour,
110% of its capacity.
So that sounds weird, but actually on a solid state battery,
a breathable solid state battery that actually sort of makes sense.
So everything keeps pointing that this is actually a solid state
battery, unlike what a lot of people were questioning
that it could be like some kind of like solid state capacitor.
But now everything points to an actual solid state battery.
There was one failure on the test here,
if I remember correctly, that was earlier in the week.
At 100 Celsius discharge, the cell pouch had lots of vacuum.
So they weren't, they were not sure though,
if it was a packaging issue, an actual cell chemistry issue.
So, but either way is just not a great look.
But again, that's a hundred Celsius.
So it's extreme extreme that there's extreme temperature
than there's extreme extreme temperature.
Like you water boils at 100 Celsius.
So it's different.
But for the most part, like if at 80, it performed well.
So you can, one of the main, one of the claims that they made
is that you can build this with very minimal climate control
like temperature control in the batch pack.
And this seems to be true.
So if you don't go into too crazy of a charge rate
and too crazy of a discharge rate,
you should be able to build this basically without any kind of
cooling system.
But again, this is now, this is the extreme temperature test
and the charging test.
We still need the energy density test.
And then, which was one of the biggest claim,
the 400 watt hour per kilogram,
which would be like industry leading.
And the other one, the most unbelievable one
is the 100,000 cycles,
which can be somewhat tested and extrapolated,
but it's going to be very, very hard to test.
So these tests are the two biggest claim really are still unproven,
but we're going in the right direction, I guess.
All right.
Should we jump into the comment section?
Yep.
All right.
So for me, question.
Hey, what is stuff going to review as EQS?
We are eyeing these crazy deals.
So it's a 2023 EQS.
I did review an EQS in 2023.
That was a 2023.
On a trip to Los Angeles.
So I can bring that back up.
I guess I could do an update on that.
You could do a post specifically on buying cheap luxury EVs.
You can do a quick research on the price.
Well, you already did the research when you bought it,
but you can post that research
and then tell the story across your experience
with the EQS SUV so far.
Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people are going through it.
Just as a quick side hit.
It's a great car.
Like it's super smooth.
I haven't had any like mechanical problems with it yet.
The screen and center software is not amazing.
It's rebooted a few times.
You know, like, you know, it runs a car play
and the car play doesn't always connect.
So you have to sometimes manually connect it.
It's like that kind of stuff, which, you know, like,
legacy auto software is not going to be great.
The battery is, you know, kind of been as advertised.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's kind of what I expected for the most part.
So, and I, you know, I paid less than the price
of a new Tesla Model Y for like a far superior car,
which has, you know, 50,000 miles on it.
Still a great car.
All right, let's move on.
Imagine if Tesla had offered the Model S long range for 60K,
they would have sold out of those as well.
I could have kept the Model S viable and competitive.
It's an interesting thought experiment.
Don't know if it's true though.
Yeah.
And also like if you mean like they keep the price like that,
I don't think they would make money on it.
So it's not.
Yeah.
They, you know, that's a small volume high end luxury.
Well, depending on your ask.
Don't know that that would be any good for anybody.
All right.
Skeptic says, do you think Tesla is making any money
on those cheaper cyber trucks?
Not at 60.
Yeah.
Not at 60.
Yeah.
Maybe at 70.
And it's, you know, it depends on actual utilization rate
of the factory.
So I don't know how many they got in orders.
So if they, if they got enough to, you know, build them
at a rate of like 15, 20,000 units a quarter,
then maybe they can get profitable at 70,000.
But it's going to be hard, but you're just,
you're not profitable if you're using a 200,000 units
or a year production line at 10% of the capacity.
All right.
I love my Yang Wang U9.
I really would like to see a Canadian U9 rolling.
And like, you have any, anybody?
Right.
I think right now you have better shot in the US.
I've been hearing a lot of, you know, Miami bro type people
that have managed to import a bunch of them.
I don't know if there's any of them in Canada.
All right.
Two live streams on YouTube are a bit confusing
on which one to use.
Why not just use one?
All right.
So that's, I don't know,
lately YouTube's got a portrait and a horizontal.
So if you're on the phone and you want to look at it like this,
you use the one and the other.
I guess we should label them or something.
I'm going to look into that.
Yes.
One is for phones.
I started on that one by mistake.
Yeah.
Do you think America will be able to purchase Yang Wings
through Canada?
And we were kind of just talking about that.
Yeah.
Yeah, eventually.
I guess now people are all in Lingda.
So there's, you need to obtain the Chinese,
like a license, but even like Tesla and then applied
to get part of the quotas because there's still
like just 49,000 units a year.
So yeah, maybe that's going to be a BYD strategy
and get into the tenant market with the IRN first.
So, you know, the Tang, the Han,
and maybe even some Yang Wang.
Yeah.
It would be cool, but it's still a problem to get it fixed
unless you live near the border.
Yeah.
I imagine if you have the kind of money,
you can probably just put it on the flatbed
and send it to somewhere.
Yeah.
It's not a cheap car that you and I, it's like $250,000.
It's not the tariff.
All right.
We talked about the QS, the Blade 2.0 and all the news
in regard to solid state out of China feels
like the U.S. is more than behind.
Are any U.S. manufacturers doing any of this?
Rivian is an increasing architecture bolt.
GM does have a magnesium battery chemistry
that their touting is having kind of the best
of LFB and lithium.
But I think they are all looking into solid state.
It's just that, you know, it's not, it's not quite ready yet.
Like even everything you announced in China,
like there's a few of them are going to roll out this year,
but it's very limited.
It's, I think the U.S. is being left behind definitely
on a bunch of the level, including this one.
It's just that if you're not expecting to sell
that many EVs in the year, you're not going to validate
the new battery pack for it anyway.
So you're just going to use what you got.
Yeah, it's terrible in any way because if you were
able to import these batteries in the U.S. right now
without tariffs and use them, that alone
plus the crazy cost of gasoline right now would be
alone, you wouldn't need any more incentive
to accelerate EV adoption in the U.S.
You would just need that.
But yeah, if you think these two things,
I'm not going to change anytime soon, I think.
Maybe at the end of the year, we'll see.
All right.
I know BYD is the media darling, but I saw an article
in the finance this week that Geely has overtaken
them in sales for multiple months in a row.
Is that right?
I mean, Geely's got some big brands.
It's hard to...
Yeah.
It's not impossible.
It's not impossible.
Like if you combine all the brands together.
Geely also has non-EV stuff still though.
Yeah.
And I guess BYD has plug-in hybrids too,
but everything has a battery in it.
I think Geely still has some that has...
It's purely combustion engine, but probably not much.
I mean, in China anyway, it's like over 50%
of electric now, so.
Yeah.
The article about Nashville and boring was great,
that Elon's original boring machine was originally
built for cutting sewer tunnels.
It tells you all you need to know about
the brands that...
Yeah.
I didn't know a little article on this this week
because I saw that Nashville,
Nashville in the city itself voted against it,
but they actually have no power.
The state has taken over the jurisdiction
for the tunnel there and has given the go-ahead
to Elon and the Barring Company.
But yeah, I mean, the main thing with it,
like I have nothing against tunnels,
tunnels sounds good.
It's just that the way that they build
tunnels, like Carl said, because they're using a smaller
machine makes for sewer tunnels,
not just sewer tunnels, but that's a good example
based on the diameter of the tunnel,
is that you don't really have anything else
that you can build other than this
one-lane route for EVs to use.
You would have to design some kind of brand new rail system,
smaller rail system, smaller subway system
to get in there.
Right now it's just made for like a car can go through
and that's it.
So if it fails, which it could very well,
you're kind of stuck with a fairly useless tunnel
and that's not ideal.
So the other thing is to prove that it works,
it would be fairly easy.
You could do, especially now with AI,
you could do very accurate models,
simulation of the use case of this specific loop system,
which build on those like these small tunnels
or you literally have Tesla vehicles in there,
that's what they're doing.
So single-lane Tesla vehicles going there.
You could do assimilation and that's the first thing,
I remember I said we were two of the first people
that actually got inside the tunnel in LA.
I got the invitation because I bought 10 ads,
10 barring company ads and that's true story.
I bought the ads, we got the invite,
I brought set as my plus one,
we went inside the tunnel and then we party
with the SpaceX and Tesla people at the SpaceX
at quarter, it was a fun night and everything,
but the first question I got to ask Elon
at the event, the press briefing was,
do you have a simulation that shows that your loop system
is more efficient than a regular transit
like a subway and he was like, yeah, of course, yeah,
we're working on that, we're gonna have that soon.
That was in 2018.
There's never been any release of study or anything like that
that's more efficient and like I wrote in my article,
what we get right now, the only working system is in Vegas
and it's like less than half of the capacity
of a subway system and that's compared
to the peak usage of it, which was like CES.
I mean, we don't have that much data on like day-to-day use
but it's apparently really minimal.
All right, comments on the US war in Iran
in terms of EV growth.
We were talking about this a little bit before the show.
Spike and oil prices might drive people to EVs
but would also help fuel Russian aggression
and fill the pockets of other oil barons.
True.
Yeah, I mean, especially if it's prolonged
which it's kind of looking like it's not going
to be over in time soon.
Yeah, prices at the pump are always good motivation to buy EV.
Super good motivation.
Yeah, it's just that by skeptics,
it's also good for the people that sells oils.
Like there's no...
Yeah.
All right, regarding Aptera,
this is an important milestone for Aptera
because these validation models help set up
the low volume production line
which will be used to build customer Aptera EVs
later this year.
That's what they're saying.
Yeah.
But there's still a long road ahead, I think.
I do not think that the vacuum loss was actually a failure.
It could be within the design parameters
like the quantum escape SS batteries that swell
and shrink with charging and discharging.
I mean, no, losing your vacuum
and I don't think that's a design feature, I think.
Because the battery didn't blow up until I thought
it was just the package fell.
So it is a failure.
So we had the same thing last week
when I mentioned the heat sink issue
at 90 degrees when it hit 90 degrees of discharging.
It's like, it happened.
It's in the report.
It's worth mentioning.
It doesn't mean that the batteries have cold failures.
It's not perfect either.
DJ New York City says,
yes, I mean when it's like buying a $125,000 car
Yeah, that should be an article that should be something like that.
Yeah, I mean, it depreciated quite fast.
But yeah, I don't know.
I mean, the thinking for me is like
all the depreciation has already happened.
You don't care if it's got 40,000 or 80,000 miles
if it's already dropped to a third at this price, I think.
By the time you have like your battery runs out
and everything like that,
that's when the next big depreciation is probably...
Right.
Yeah, Mercedes has a great warranty
I think 10 years on the battery.
There's nothing innovative about the boring company.
Other tunneling companies have said
that they can tunnel as fast and cheap,
but the size is useless.
Yeah, that's true.
I don't know how entirely it's true
but the speed, I don't know if they work quite a bit
on the machine, maybe it's a little bit faster
and everything, I don't know about that.
But I do know that that is the narrative of other companies
where when Elon claims innovation with the boring companies
most people say like we can do what you do
is just there's no real demand for it.
So the boring company is sort of creating its own demand
with the loop system.
Like this is what we can do with these tunnels
is just that most people that look at this objectively
don't see a lot of value in this specific use of these tunnels
which then means that the tunnels themselves
might not be useful.
All right, Spikes43 says
I really like the Cadillac review this week,
great format going forward.
I would suggest putting efficiency number higher up
in the article, right?
Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, yeah, for people who don't know this,
this is pretty cool.
So my friend Bastien has been hired
for kind of the electric review manager
where he set up a new system, a scoring system for reviews.
So it's more precise.
We're still, you know, everyone at Electric
can do reviews and everything
and we have the freedom to do them as we want
but the scoring is more precise
and carries out across every EVs that we do
including efficiency for example.
I'm going to look into it.
I don't remember where it was in the article
but I do think we put the score at the top too.
So what's going to happen is after we have a few of these
like right now it's not more detailed
because we only have one
but we have a few of them coming up in the next few weeks.
We're going to have a new page on Electric
which is going to be Electric Rankings
and then you're going to have on the one page
all of these reviews listed by Rank
by the one that scored better.
It scored from 0 to 100.
So you get a nice whole percentage score
and yeah, it's going to be quicker
to get an idea to compare them
and yeah, I hope you guys like the review.
If you haven't seen Best Things Review
with the Cadillac Vistick, go check it out
and give us some feedback on their needs
so that we can tune the system appropriately.
Cool, that's all the questions for today.
All right, well that was a quick show this week.
I hope you guys enjoyed it.
If you did, please give us a thumbs up,
a like, a subscribe, whatever it is on the app you're watching.
It helps a ton.
If you're listening only,
if you can give us a five-star rating,
only if you think we deserve it
and also help quite a bit.
Thank you very much.
About this episode
The discussion covers Tesla's unusual Cybertruck pricing strategy, including a brief $60,000 all-wheel-drive launch followed by a $10,000 price hike, creating artificial urgency and confusing demand signals. Tesla's FSD transfer policy changes and Canadian Model 3 inventory shifts due to tariffs are also analyzed. BYD's impressive new Blade Battery 2.0 technology promises up to 600 miles range and ultra-fast charging, setting a new industry benchmark. The episode also touches on BYD's upcoming luxury U7 sedan and Denza Z9 with extended ranges, highlighting BYD's growing dominance in EV tech and innovation.
In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss the Cybertruck price increase, BYD making everyone look bad, and a Donut Lab battery update.
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